--wrote _Volupte_.

The revolution of 1830, with the events that led to it, marks a
turning-point in literary as well as in political history. The public
mind was in a state of ebullition very unlike that of an ordinary
political contest, in which one party pulls while the other applies the
drag, one seeks to maintain, the other to destroy. All parties were
pulling in different directions; all sought to destroy, in order to
reconstruct; principles, except with the extremists, were simply
expedients, adopted to-day, abandoned on the morrow. Nor is this to be
explained, as English writers generally explain it, by the mere
volatility of the French temperament. In England, an established basis
of political power is slowly but constantly expanding; privilege
crumbles and wears away under the gradual action of democracy;
concession on the one side, moderation on the other, are perfectly
feasible, and obviate the necessity for sudden ruptures and violent
transitions. But in France the question created by past convulsions, and
left unsolved by recent experiments, was this: What _is_ the basis of
power? Privilege had been so shorn that those who desired to make that
the foundation were necessarily not conservatives, but reactionists. On
the other hand, if popular power were to be accepted in its widest
sense, then a thousand questions, a thousand differences of opinion in
regard to the mode, the form, the application, would naturally spring
up. Besides, would it not be safer, wiser, to modify ideas by
experience, to look abroad for patterns, to seek for an equilibrium, a
_juste milieu_? Thus there was a diversity of systems, but all
contemplative of change. No one was in favor of standing still, for
there was nothing to stand upon. In a word, the agitation was not so
much one of measures, of principles, or of prejudices, as of ideas.

Now in an agitation of this kind, literary men--that is to say, the men
whose business is to think--are likely to be active, and in France, at
least, are apt to become prominent and influential. But they, of all
men, by the very fact that they think, are least under the control of
party affinities and fixed doctrines, the most liable to be swayed by
discussion and reflection. Hence the spectacle, so frequent at that time
and since, of men distinguished in the world of letters passing from the
ranks of the legitimists into those of the republicans, from the
advocacy of papal supremacy in temporal a